Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

CIT is the gift that keeps on giving. The president, Dr. O'Connor, had an opportunity to break from the past but we are going around in circles and it has been going on for years. Nothing has been learnt. Last year, the committee said governance was poor and risk management non-existent, and now CIT is trying to tell us again that there is nothing to see here. I could talk on this for hours but I will not do so as we have been through it so often. They are effectively investigating themselves and they are trying to justify themselves again with this letter, saying they have processes in place to deal with it.

Where does the committee from here? Do we make a recommendation that somebody goes in and investigates them? What powers do we have? We will have a meeting in a couple of weeks on third level education with Dr. Love but he will not be able to answer questions specific to CIT. We can talk about how the process was investigated but we will not be able to deal with the other issues.

This has been going on for the guts of four or five years and we have not yet even got to the €13,000 that was spent on the lavish party, on which I have some correspondence separate from that of the committee and about which I will talk in a while. Where are we going to go? The Chairman, Deputy MacSharry and I have gone through this many times and we cannot keep going round in circles. How are we going to get a body to go in, once and for all, and investigate what has happened here?